If you’re a fan of British folk music, then you’ll know the trope of the mariner who’s gone to sea and then is reunited with his true love, with so many years passed in between that the only way they can be sure they’re the people they claim to be is by matching halves of a ring that they broke in twain on parting.

Well, hum a few bars of “The Dark-Eyed Sailor” while considering this news from the fossil world: back in the heady days of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Thoreauvian wandering, half of a fossilized turtle humerus, taken from a cutbank in New Jersey, winds up in the hands of Louis Agassiz, the great naturalist. The other remains buried in Cretaceous-era sediments for another century and a half until it’s plucked out by an amateur paleontologist, who, on examining the marks that a shark gnawed into it way back when, realizes it’s not a strangely shaped rock. The halves are reunited, and suddenly scientists have a sense of scale of one of the biggest species of sea turtle that ever lived—a “monster, probably the maximum size you can have for a sea turtle,” as one paleontologist told BBC News. Look for an account of the discovery and its implications in a forthcoming number of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
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Meanwhile, on the Isle of Wight, where British folk music is no stranger, two collectors found two pieces of a skeleton—a snout and part of a skull—that, when pieced together, have provided scientists with enough evidence to propose a new species of crocodile. Called Koumpiodontosuchus aprosdokiti, or “unexpected button-toothed crocodile,” the toothy critter, like that giant sea turtle, lived about 125 million years ago.

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Step back another 100 million years, and you’re in the Triassic. Waltz over to West Texas, and you’re in a sticky swamp full of slow-moving streams and oxbow incidents—not least the demise of a female phytosaur and, nearby, a male of her kind. A murder-suicide? An accident of fate. Whatever the case, the word “monster” has been applied to the newly identified species—which, as it happens, resembles a modern crocodile in most respects except for the configuration of its nose and its massive size. For particulars, see this recent issue of the scholarly journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

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Finally, in another desert far away, workers digging a roadcut in Chile discovered a whale graveyard well inland from the present ocean—from a time, that is, when the ocean was considerably higher than it is now, a time dating back some five to seven million years. This report, again courtesy of the BBC, gives a sense of how unusual the find is.

One wonders what future explorers will find five to seven million years from now, when the now-rising high seas will have receded once again. One thing we can say about all these fossils is that we have an alibi: we weren’t around when the creatures passed into the beyond. That’s not true of more recent megafauna, the subject of a conference held last month at Oxford University. We’re fully implicated there, and the killers are still on the loose.

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.

Why London’s pig café pop-up is a terrible idea for pigs: Teacup pigs are adorable. Unfortunately, they’re also a complete fabrication. But that isn’t stopping a local London specialty breeder and Yelp from putting on an adoption event to educate the public on “proper” micro pig care.